Friday, November 04, 2005

Fri - OK so Microsoft are definitely trying to become Google

This has been an extraordinary week for Microsoft. First they tell us that they are planning to become the on demand software company of the future, beating back current leader Google. Today they tell us that they're going to beat Google at making a bunch more library books available over the internet.

Given that Microsoft are a little legally jaded after numerous settlements and fines over the last bunch of years we can't help feeling that they may keep their efforts focussed on books they can legally scan - i.e. probably pre 1923 and considered to be in the public domain.

Mind you, not wishing to be out Microsofted, Amazon today announced that they're planning to sell single pages of books over the internet. This is presumably the book worlds equivalent of iTunes - instead we now have iPages...or whatever. Quite why you'd want to read/buy/whatever one page of a book over the web I can't quite figure out - but I'm sure I'm missing something - I normally do!